


The Things I Do For Love

by HNJ



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon Divergence, Episode: s08e04 The Last of the Starks, F/M, Fix-It, Hygiene Maintenance As A Love Language, Love Confessions, Oral Sex, Vaginal Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-15
Updated: 2020-11-15
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:27:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27579155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HNJ/pseuds/HNJ
Summary: Both of them had planned to die at Winterfell. They are granted something else instead.Covers the month between the victory celebration and the departure of Daenerys' forces. Ignores the ending of 8x04.
Relationships: Jaime Lannister/Brienne of Tarth
Comments: 67
Kudos: 180





	The Things I Do For Love

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to write about Jaime choosing to live with Brienne instead of dying with Cersei so this is really a story about Jaime's decision to stay, but I love Brienne too much not to explore it from her perspective.
> 
> Also, I've elected to ignore the baby because I had kinda always thought that was gonna be a fabrication on Cersei's part. Let's just say Jaime found out it was a lie before he left King's Landing.

Brienne is no stranger to rough nights. She has spent too much of her life on the road not to have built up a tolerance to sore backs, cold feet, and dirt.

The pain that wakes her this morning, though, is unfamiliar. She aches, everywhere, even though the bed below her is soft and the furs above her warm with her night’s sleep. Her mouth is dry.

She tries shifting towards the water jug, only to be confronted with a stomach that very much resents that movement and a warm lump in her way. She stays still long enough to comfort her roiling guts, gritting her teeth against the nausea.

The warm lump is an entirely different matter.

She knows if she opens her eyes she will see Jaime Lannister in her bed. He will be asleep, he will be lovely, and he will be naked. She doesn’t open her eyes.

Her hand is close enough that she can feel the heat of him, the heat contributing to the little nest of warmth they’ve managed to carve out of the endless cold. As she slips back towards the other side, her hand slides away. Her stomach is no more pleased with this movement than the other. She goes slowly and thinks that if this is the price of drinking, she cannot understand why people pay it.

The sense memory of unrestrained laughter, of a hand on her cheek and lips on hers, comes unbidden.

The water is sent from the gods. She chugs as much as there is left in the jug, feeling it soothe every part of her on its way down.

Her clothes are in desperate need of a wash. They are hard with blood and dirt when she picks them up. She leaves Jaime’s clothes on the floor where he’d dropped them last night. She would not know where to put them.

Extra clothes are a luxury few can afford, but before she had left on her fool’s quest to join Renly Baratheon’s Kingsguard her father had given her armor, tunics, and shoes. He had equipped her with a sword, kissed her forehead, and wished her luck.

She’s never been more grateful for those gifts than she is now, as the clean fabric slips over her head and she steps into unsoiled trousers. Not when she’d been on the road for months at a time and not when she had to double up her layers on reaching the North. She is grateful for so many things, even as her body aches and she has to concentrate to keep the contents of her stomach where they are supposed to be. 

She is alive. _Fought dead things and lived to talk about it_.

The morning greets her like it knows what she’s thinking. It has snowed overnight but the sun is shining in a rare lack of clouds. White blankets everything like a new start to their world. The air is cold but it is refreshing rather than stinging today. Is this what the promise of life does? Things once to be endured now to be enjoyed.

Many people have beaten her to the start of the day. There are some already at work. They had, as a collective, moved the bodies yesterday. They had burned their dead and burned their enemies. It had been the time to say goodbye, an opportunity to start incorporating their losses into themselves. She had never been in battle before, for as much as her life orbits them, and did not know its intricacies. The fight was something she recognized, the aftermath is something else entirely.

Today, people seem more settled, if still weighted down by grief. The lost and the dead (one and the same) are gone and no one has to look into their unmoving faces anymore. They live only in memory now and that is easier. The tasks ahead of everyone are routine, washing and cleaning. Tasks where they may fall back onto muscle memory and slip out of their present for a while.

She finds Sansa, who is helping to direct the clean-up, and acquires a task.

She does not think about the man she left lying in her bed.

* * *

Vomit stains the snow she had been clearing. She is doubled over but she is luckily alone. Her shame is her own.

Whatever beauty the snow had charmed her with this morning is gone now. When she was a child she had thought of snow as a soft coating over the earth. She doesn’t understand how it can be so heavy or so wet. The water from this morning may also have been a mistake.

Her stomach is more settled after the retching stops but it’s only a temporary reprieve. She has already been sick twice before this.

She makes use of her amnesty by clearing more snow. If it wasn’t for the vomiting, she wouldn’t mind the work. It’s a monotonous kind that only requires her body. Her head can slip away. But she comes back to herself with the vomiting. It tethers her to this moment, this place, last night.

She doesn’t want to think about last night. She doesn’t want to think about what she’s going to do about last night. Give her the snow and the shovel instead.

The memories creep in anyway.

His eyes had been on her all the time. Every time she looked at him, he was looking at her. He had laughed with her and they had all laughed together, the four of them at that table. She had been having _fun_.

And he had followed her to her room and made awkward, unsubtle advances and she finally knew she hadn’t been imagining something in the way he stared at her. They had taken off their clothes before they even kissed.

And—oh—the kissing.

It was all so new and she had nothing to compare it to but the alcohol had them both loose and uncaring about technique. As long as his mouth was on her, somewhere, anywhere, she didn’t care. His mouth was lovely and his touch was lovely and his eyes (seeing her, seeing her, seeing her) were lovely too.

She does not know whether to be embarrassed of the sounds she made or the way she moved. She does not know how she compares to Cersei.

When she was a girl, only just learning how ugly she was, her father had held a ball with all the minor lords and ladies from the local mainland. It had taken months to prepare, rivalled in preparation only by the ball where she met Renly Baratheon. As daughter of the host she was included in the circle of the highest status ladies attending, but even then Brienne could tell they didn’t want her there.

They were done up like dolls, or paintings, something motionless and meant for admiration. But the way they talked, the things they had done, she knew that they weren’t as lifeless as they looked. They had seemed so knowledgeable, how coyly they talked of men.

One of them had recently slept with Jaime Lannister.

Not that she came out and said that. But the way she paused and the words she emphasized, the implication was enough. Implication, Brienne knew now, was all there was. Jaime had only ever slept with Cersei. Well. And—

The girl had seemed so proud of her conquest. She had subdued the Golden Lion, brought to his knees a knight who’d killed a king. Brienne remembers being disgusted with her. How could she have let so detestable a man into her? How could she stand his touch?

Brienne, now, here, in this stronghold of the North, who fought dead things and lived to tell about it, pushes her shovel harder into the snow.

* * *

She doesn’t see him until supper and only then does she realize how intentional her avoidance of him has been.

He doesn’t notice her at first. She’s grateful. It gives her a moment to steady herself. He doesn’t look his best, as if he too has spent some of the day retching into the snow. For the first time, she wonders how drunk he was last night. For the first time, she realizes that he may not remember. 

But then he turns and sees her looking at him and she knows. He remembers, his eyes say, although her certainty seems to be born from nowhere. She looks back to her food.

Around her, people are working their way up to a second night of festivities. More keep arriving, laughter is getting louder, and wine has started being passed around. It is an exhausting mix, these swings between grief and joy. Loss hangs over all of them but the rush of victory, and of survival, hasn’t yet faded.

Jaime sits down across from her.

“Is this taken?” He says, even though there is no one within ten feet of her.

“Feel free.” She says under a sudden determination to act normal. “It will be crowded soon.”

He looks to the steady flow of people through the door and nods. She takes the moment to observe him close-up. _Mistake_ , she thinks when he turns back and they’re looking directly at each other. Something in his expression shifts and she just knows he is going to bring up last night so she—

“I never knew snow could be so heavy.”

“What?” He says, thrown out of sync.

“I shoveled today. When I thought of snow as a child, I pictured it fluffy. But it was heavy and wet.”

“And I thought you liked the fucking North?”

He’s trying, so desperately, to steer her to last night. It is unfair of her, she knows, trying to keep them away from so inevitable a conservation. She takes a breath. She is brave. She beat the Hound, she fought the dead, and she slept with Jaime Lannister. 

“I said it grew on me.” She says and lets him take the opening.

“Anything else grown on you lately?”

She has hurt him. Of course. What would she have thought, if it had been her to wake without him? Her heart aches; she hadn’t meant to be cruel.

“Jaime—”

“Not the best sign, is it?” He says, drily. “Waking up alone and then avoided. I would like to know—what was it that turned you off in the light of day? My gold is on the stump or the sister-fucking—”

“Stop that.” She won’t let him ruin it. She knows what last night had been and in the face its trivialization she won’t let either of them run from it. Not because of fear or some misplaced sense of self-destruction. She was not brave enough to face it on her own but—she realizes quite suddenly—she does not have it to face it alone. In actuality, she cannot. Last night was something they did together and they will always be bound by it, no matter its outcome.

He falls silent but it is expectant. Words do not come easy to her. What can she say that will give form to the intangible things tossing and crashing within her? It would be simpler to explain the sea.

How does she tell him that, two nights ago, she had knelt before him and he had given her the dignity of acknowledgement? How does she convey how glorious it was to pair their emotional intimacy—something she had so long called friendship but was beginning to think she needed to rename—to their physical? How overwhelming, how wonderful, to see where the two vulnerabilities matched up, where they intersected and crossed over, where they slid against each other so seamlessly that the two may as well have been one.

How does she make him believe it?

“I did not mean to leave you alone.” She says. “I was afraid of what we might do to each other.”

They are the wrong words, she knows immediately. He detaches from her even more than when he was throwing barbs. He has spent so long afraid of the person he loves.

“Not like that.” Brienne reaches out and covers his hand like he covered hers only a day ago. “I only meant that neither of us are quite experienced in this. It doesn’t come easy.”

His eyes betray him. He bares his soul there, if you know what to look for. She’s beginning to suspect that she does.

“Then why did you?” He is quiet, too quiet for the raucous atmosphere of the banquet hall. His tone too honest for the supper table. It is more suited to familiar chambers, illuminated by the roaring fire in the hearth.

“Why did I what?”

“Leave.” He says, as if that’s the obvious and only answer.

“I just told you.”

“You aren’t one to run away from things because of fear.”

“This is different from a battle, you realize.”

“Is it?” He looks skeptical.

“Yes.” She squeezes the hand she’s still holding. It seems he had forgotten, because his eyes are drawn back to their hands on the table. She looks too.

“Eat with me in my room.” She offers while they aren’t looking each other in the eyes.

“You’ve already finished.” He points out.

“We can bring the dishes back later.”

“I don’t know—I thought I might expand my circle tonight. See what the wilding is up to.”

She gives the side of his head the look that deserves.

He’s silent for a few moments and then he looks up at her as if to say, _Alright, then. Onward._

He pushes out of his seat and takes his plate. Brienne follows after him.

* * *

Jaime’s the one to put a log on the fire this time, although it’s still hale and hearty. He must have been tending to it all day. Brienne pictures it—Jaime, alone, coming back through the hours to stoke the fire she’d abandoned. She wonders what he was thinking when she failed to materialize at every turn.

He sits down at her tiny table and selects a piece of meat. She’s glad he didn’t choose the bed. At least, not just yet. They’re still not on level ground and she wants them to be before they start reaching for each other again. If they reach for each other again.

“I’m sorry I left.” She picks up the thread of conversation they’d dropped in the banquet hall.

“Nothing to apologize for. I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to. Morning is a different place than the night.”

He’s running again. Part of her wants to shake him, to tell him exactly why she did what she did last night and hope it gets through his thick skull. Another part of her is just as unsure as he is.

“Why did you come here last night?” She says instead.

“I should think that was fairly obvious.”

“I’m not talking about what you wanted, I’m talking about why.”

“What does it matter why?”

Silence works wonders on Jaime Lannister. She refuses to be drawn into his misdirection. Even after a lifetime of Cersei and Tyrion, he is too honest to hold up manipulation for any length of time. Allow him enough space and he gives in.

“We’re alive.” He says. “We fought by each other’s side. You looked happy, during the game. I wanted to make you happy like that.”

Her breath seems to get stuck on its path through her body.

“I want to do it again.” She says. He once told her that she had the heart of a gambler. She thinks, all these years later, that he may have been right.

“Brienne—”

“We don’t have to promise each other anything. We’re here now. You want to and I want to—isn’t that enough?”

“Yes.” He says and comes forward to hold her face in his hand. “Yes, it’s enough.”

It seems an eon since he’s kissed her. She is no stranger to want but this feels different. This is not simple desire, this is need. Where had it been hiding within her? Had it been sleeping undisturbed her whole life? It seems impossible that she could have buried something so strong. Her eyes slide down to his lips.

She leans forward and closes her eyes and he is just as sweet as her drunken memory recalls.

They are more hesitant this time around, proclamations of want notwithstanding. He guides her into a soft kiss and she lets him. She has gotten them to this point, it is his turn to lead for a while.

She wonders what he thinks about having to lean up to kiss her. Should she move them towards the bed, maneuver them in a more level position? She almost wishes she was drunk again. These thoughts—the ones that remind her how big she is, how she appears to others—had been stamped out last night. The alcohol had dampened them and bolstered her into some unfamiliar, free being. 

She wants to lose her inhibitions.

His touch on her neck is stunning. He doesn’t hold her in place (she wouldn’t let him anyway), he just holds her. A steady, warm reminder of his presence. She wants him to feel what she does so she brings her hands up to hold him in return.

He stutters a bit in the kiss and she feels a rush of pride she had been far too gone to experience yesterday. She can make him feel good. She wants to do it more.

Whoever moves first Brienne isn’t quite sure but they head towards her bed. She wonders how long it will take for it to become their bed. Or is it theirs already? Is once enough to change something like that? She thinks it might be, as she sits down and he kisses her until she’s laying down with her feet still on the floor.

He leans back until he rests on his ankles at her feet. She misses his mouth immediately.

As if he senses this, Jaime presses kisses against her calf, the side of her knee, her lower thigh. But the sensation is muted by cloth. It is time for the trousers to go, she decides.

When she starts unlacing them, his hand comes up to grab hers.

“Wait,” he says. Was his voice that wrecked a moment ago? “We should go slowly.”

Pardon her inexperience, but she does not see the point in going slowly.

“Then why are you down there?”

The smile he gives her is one she’s seen a hundred times. “Why _would_ I be down here?”

“If you’re doing what I think you’re doing, I can assure you this will not be slow.”

“Oh, alright.” He says. His knees crack on the way back up and he frowns at that. She moves to unlace her shoes (he follows suit) and then slides up the bed, allowing them both to lay down, his body settled between her knees.

This is how they made love yesterday. Realizing they have returned to it makes her ears hot. She remembers throwing her legs around his body and pushing him deeper into her. She remembers his mouth at her temple, her cheek, not so much kissing her as mouthing at her. He had been too far gone for the coordination that kissing required. She wonders if he’s thinking of the same thing. She hopes she’s not blushing.

He has no such problem now, as he moves his mouth over hers. They are moving deeper, incorporating tongues and opening up to each other. It is, frankly, a messy affair. She cannot understand what makes it so arousing even as she has the proof of it pooling in her belly right now. 

She grabs at his tunic, pulling it from its entrapment in his trousers. She doesn’t know if this counts as slow, but she needs to touch him. His skin is warm beneath her fingers as she explores all of its shapes. The flat plain of his stomach and the hills where his bones push out from inside him. His tree-spotted torso, the hair congregating at his chest.

He groans and she loves that sound. He helps her rid him of his shirt entirely and she pushes him onto his back so that she can kiss at his chest. His hand comes up to bury itself in her hair. She doesn’t have much of it but that doesn’t seem to deter him. He threads his fingers through. The slight tug is nice on her scalp, like a caress.

She gets a little lost in it, touching him. It is relentless waves of want and satisfaction. She wants to run her finger over his nipple, so she does, and then she wants to kiss it, so she does, and then he makes a desperate noise and she wants to use her tongue against it, so she does. It is unending.

The cycle shifts, eventually, when his hand pulls at her shirt. She had taken it off so easily last night that she can’t quite believe it. Was that really her, who tugged at her laces so unreservedly?

She hesitates now. She knows he wants her but can it really extend to this? She understands the pull to what's between her legs, but the rest of her…. It seems something more to put up with than to appreciate.

“Brienne?” His hand is on her shirt still but it is unmoving.

“I can keep it on.”

“And why on earth would you do that?”

“I—” She falters. She does not want to say it.

“I will beg you if I must.”

“What?”

“Please, Brienne, let me see you.” He says and puts his mouth close to her ear. “Let me touch you.”

She can’t keep her eyes open. They close as if that would shut out his words. Even though she doesn’t want to shut them out. They are lovely words and she, so desperately, wants him to mean them. They are a gift so precious that she doesn’t want to acknowledge it. If she doesn’t fight to keep them out, they will make a home so deep in her she fears she will not be able to live without them.

But it is too late. They are already there, growing within her. She puts her hand over his and they remove her shirt together.

He tends to her chest the way she did to him. It sends her head into a frenzy, to be on the receiving end. He kisses her and laps at her and everywhere his mouth isn’t, his hand is. Eventually, he guides her onto her back and then, oh, it is even better. She feels almost like the altar at which he is praying.

He moves down her chest until the top of her trousers force him to halt. She reaches down and starts unlacing them again and he doesn’t stop her this time. Once she has the laces undone, he takes over pulling them down her legs. He goes slowly but he is a lot more adept at maneuvering with one hand when he isn’t drunk. He kisses the patches of skin as they appear. He alternates between her legs, as if he can’t decide on which one to shower his attention.

When he drops her trousers over the side of the bed, she takes the opportunity to push her smallclothes down as well. She throws them in the same general direction but neatness is far from her primary concern right now.

He comes back to her and she is naked. He starts his kisses at her knees and works his way up. Brienne leans back and lets herself feel his journey. When he reaches the spot between her legs, she understands why people call it their center. She is reasonably convinced that her mind has decided to pack up shop in her head and move down there instead.

She grunts and grabs at his hair.

“Ow.” He says into her thigh.

“Sorry, sorry.” She says, but it’s breathless.

She loosens her grip but as soon as he returns to that spot, her hands clench again.

“Brienne.”

“Sorry.”

She moves her hands to the sheets next to her, which have no complaint about how hard she pulls, but it doesn’t feel right. She wants to be touching him, not her bed. She moves one hand to his shoulder and the other to grab at her own hair.

If she felt like an altar before, now she is the god to which he prays. 

Rhythm is his technique and it succeeds gloriously. She moves with him and pulls on her hair so hard it starts to hurt. His motion between her legs is a million little spikes of pleasure.

“Jaime,” she says and feels him go soft at it. “Jaime, Jaime, Jaime, Jaime.”

It feels a bit like claiming him, his name alone in her mouth. People call him so many things, so many false things. Who calls him by his name?

She does. She does and she will for as long as he lets her. 

She searches for his hand and grabs it tight. Only two nights before they had been in battle together. It had been an overstimulating mess but they had kept sight of each other. He had hacked at wights that overwhelmed her, she had torn down those who went for his blind spot. They did not let go of each other then and they will not let go of each other now.

Everything that had been building for the last half-hour rushes up within her all at once. It has twice the power of what she remembers from last night. Sounds leave her without permission and she seeks out more of his mouth, riding the last swells of that force. He lets her.

When she returns to herself, it is like the tide has gone out again. She feels unoccupied and exposed.

Alright, okay. She understands now the appeal of slow.

“How was that?” He says as he returns to her side and threads his fingers through her hair.

“Bah.”

Oh. That was meant to be words.

She kisses him instead and hopes he understands. She thinks he does because he kisses back with intensity. Such an intensity that she realizes he has not shared in her respite. She had almost forgotten that he had not peaked with her.

Should she offer him her mouth, as he did for her?

“What,” she says, not quite sure how to phrase it, “What do you want?”

“You.” He says. “Anything.”

She kisses his neck to buy herself time and hide the blush she feels warming her cheeks. She is so new to being wanted. She can feel him, hard, against her. That very part of him, she thinks a little incredulously, had been _in_ her last night.

As she slides against him and coaxes out more of those wonderful noises, her lust returns and she almost hates the cloth of his pants for standing between them.

“In me?” She says, and leans back at her own bluntness. He, too, is surprised, but more than that he seems enthralled by her.

“Yes,” he manages. “Yes.”

She undoes his laces quickly, shucks his trousers without ceremony. He is hard and she knew that before but it is one thing to feel it and entirely another to see it. They hadn’t taken their time last night and she had barely been able to look at him between undressing and ending up on her back.

She reaches out and touches him, gently. He closes his eyes when he groans this time. It stings a bit, that he will not look at her, before she realizes that he can’t. Her stomach swoops low at the thought. She is overwhelming him. It makes her feel the way she does when she has the advantage in combat. There is power in this act, she thinks.

She leads him onto his back and shifts forward so that she straddles his hips. She knows she does not look delicate or deferential from this angle (she does not look that from any angle), but it also seems that he does not care. His hand flies out to hold her hip and his other arm holds himself up. She cups his face and leans down to kiss him.

After, she moves up onto her knees and takes him in her hand. She leads him to her and starts to lower herself down. It is more difficult than she remembers from last night but she suspects the alcohol had something to do with the ease. When she was young, a knight in court once fell and cut himself on his sword after one too many ales. He hadn’t felt a thing, he’d said.

It only gets harder the more she lowers herself and eventually she has to stop. Fuck. She had wanted to be good at this.

“Brienne,” Jaime says and pushes himself to a sitting position. It is worse, the reminder that he is witnessing her shame. He kisses her cheeks, her forehead, her nose, her ears. “Brienne. Relax.”

“I’m relaxed.” She says through gritted teeth.

He raises an eyebrow. She takes his point.

She breathes deep. Relaxed, she can do relaxed. But then his hand moves from her hip to the spot he’d used his mouth on earlier. She sucks in a breath. His hand moves gently but intentionally. That’s right, she thinks wildly, this is something they’re doing together.

Between his hand and his kisses, at her neck now, it does not take long to work her back up into a state. The longer it goes on, the better the part of him inside her feels until she wants more of it. As she lowers herself this time, she finds it so easy, like that is where he’s meant to be.

When he is fully nestled inside her, she opens her eyes. She had not realized she’d closed them. She focuses immediately on his face. He is already looking at her. She brings her hand up to stroke his cheek at the same time he brings his up to stroke hers and their arms run into each other.

He laughs and it’s the most beautiful thing she’s ever heard. Better, even, than his noises from earlier. She laughs too.

She rests her hand on his chest and pushes until he lays down again. Their laughter fades as she starts to move in earnest. Her septa had never spoken of this position but she’s overheard enough camp talk to understand the basics. It’s a bit like riding a horse, she thinks as they match up their rhythms. Then his hand changes its pace to complement the one of their hips and she forgets about horses and everything else that isn’t him.

She makes noise, a lot of it. The sounds are pushed out of her, as if her body is too full to house them any longer. He is quieter but he echoes her sounds with his own. It is a kind of conversation, she thinks. A dialogue between two.

She can feel it when he starts circling the precipice. She hadn’t the mind to pay attention to the details last night but now she is consumed by it. His rhythm falters and his breath comes in short huffs. She slides her hand up to his cheek.

“Well come on, then.” She says, fondly.

He falls over the edge with her holding him. She hears it in his last moan, feels it in the way he goes as deep into her as possible. She watches him unravel, sees the very moment when all thoughts are put on hold. There is only her and him and their bodies.

Even as he throws his head back and closes his eyes, his hand doesn’t stop. Between watching him reach his peak and the constant attention of his hand, she is at her own. She lets herself slip into it without a fight. It is almost madness.

They catch their breath as they would after a sparring session. She moves herself off him and lies down at his side. She keeps a hand on him, loathe to forfeit their contact. He touches her too.

They don’t say anything. Despite their nakedness and their touches, she almost feels that they are back in the banquet hall. Words escape her. Is it always like this, that they shutter themselves again so soon after?

She is asleep before she thinks any more on it.

* * *

He must wake before her this morning. He is already sitting up when she blinks her eyes open, the furs pooled at his waist. She pushes herself up beside him, taking the covers with her so as not to expose her chest to the sunrise air. Jaime looks at her.

“You snore in your sleep.” He says, delighted.

“I do not.” She defends, even though she has no idea if he’s right.

This starts a bickering which lasts through the search for their clothes, the walk to the banquet hall (supper plate in hand), and halfway through breakfast. They are interrupted by a hungover Tyrion Lannister.

“Oh, haven’t you gotten this out of your systems yet?” He says, his head in his hands.

“Too much ale, little brother?” Jaime says. “What _has_ happened to your reputation?”

“Age comes for us all, _elder_ sibling.”

The meal passes amicably. Tyrion is called away to some stately duty of the Hand. Jaime and Brienne find tasks to complete, spending most of the day moving the bricks of fallen defenses.

Her eyes find Jaime, over and over. She cannot stop herself. If they were not surrounded by people, she’s sure she would reach out to touch him. Sometimes, he’s already looking at her. He smiles, when they catch each other’s gaze.

Gods, what are they doing?

How long can it go on?

Sansa calls for her after supper. Everyone is already assembled in the war chamber when Brienne arrives. Dread bubbles in her stomach. She had rather thought she’d be dead if they ever made it to this conversation.

The Dragon Queen wants to move on King’s Landing.

* * *

A month. They have a month.

She does not know how to tell Jaime. If he has made plans, now that he didn’t die at Winterfell, he hasn’t shared them with her. She thinks about keeping the information to herself, but only for a moment. She does not play games.

He is staring into the fire when she returns.

“How long?” He asks and of course he knew. There’s only one reason left, she supposes, for the war council to meet.

“A month.”

He nods.

“As Lady Stark’s sworn sword,” she says and doesn’t understand why these words are coming out of her mouth. Is she really so eager to lose him? “I will stay in Winterfell.” 

“I know.”

She wants him to be snide at her. Be cruel and uncaring, the arrogant Kingslayer she met in a foul stockade. It was easier when she hated him.

Her own bitterness takes her by surprise. Arrogant and unkind he may have been, but Jaime is no longer that man. He is good. He does not deserve her ire.

They will simply have to make the most of the time they are given. If it only lasts until the troops leave Winterfell, so be it. She can content herself with this. Or, she can’t, but she would rather have the memories than lost opportunity.

She walks to his side and cups his face in her hands. She leads him to her lips and the kiss she gives him is soft.

Despite how it starts, their lovemaking is wilder that night.

“Say my name,” he says, frantically, near the end, “Brienne, please, say my name.”

“Jaime.” She holds him close to her and kisses him through both of their peaks.

* * *

They continue like this. In the days they help restore Winterfell and at night they collapse into each other. They don’t always have sex, but they never go long without it. They are obsessed with touching each other.

When she can forget, it is astounding. He makes her forget so often, when he kneels before her or she before him. When he is inside her, it seems impossible that a time should ever come when he is gone from her arms. To lose herself in him, and he in her, has made her days so bright.

One morning, she wakes to find him already dressed.

“Do you trust me?” he says, smiling, and tosses her clothes to her.

They take two horses and ride out into the countryside. It’s beautiful, even Jaime has to admit to that. The air is still and quiet, as if they walk through the world without adherence to the passage of time. It is its own sort of peace.

The last time they ventured into the woods together, he was her prisoner. She remembers how hard he had tried to provoke her, how much she had seethed over his comments.

“This seems a nice spot to spar, my lady.” He says as he stops his horse at a space of level ground. The trees are far enough apart that they would pose no obstacle. “Does it not?”

“I thought we were taking a break from the work at Winterfell.”

“Oh, as if you aren’t itching to pick up your sword again. It’ll have gone rusty by now with how little you’ve used it.”

“I told you, the restoration—”

“Ser Brienne, my darling, please spar with me.”

She rolls her eyes but slides off her horse. They tether the two mares to a tree far enough out of the way that they are in no danger. He is right, she has been longing for her training sessions. She hasn’t missed so many since she was a little girl. Well, she thinks as she watches him out of the corner of her eye, she has been rather busy lately.

They start their contest by circling one another. He isn’t the fighter he used to be but his instincts are much improved from when he first started with his left hand. She makes the first move, when she becomes tired of waiting for him. It is what he wanted, she realizes, as he uses the force of her attack to off-balance her. She doesn’t trip but she falls off her rhythm. It’s begun, then.

She is pleased with how little her injuries bother her. They only mildly twinge as she moves with him and around him. But she can tell that she’s out of practice, even though it hasn’t been that long. It is startling, the difference a few weeks can make. 

By the sixth time he has yielded to her, she feels she has blown off most of the dust. She can’t let that happen again, though. She must try harder to find the time for practice. She supposes it won’t be that difficult soon, when he is gone.

“We should be getting back.” She says, her mood suddenly clouded.

“Alright.” He goes to ready the horses, his good humor seemingly unaffected. She gathers their things. As she goes to settle her pack on the saddle, she pauses.

Tucked into the stirrup leathers is a small, white flower.

She looks to Jaime. He’s not looking at her but he’s smiling. She takes the flower out gently and slips it into the side of her belt, where she can be certain that it won’t be crushed by her cloak.

When they return to the warmth of the castle, she finds a small cup to place it in and fills the bottom with water. She makes sure to place it in the center of their table, where it could not be missed. 

* * *

“I won’t be very good.” He says, a few weeks in.

“You’ll be fine.”

“I really think you should ask someone else. Preferably someone with two hands.”

“If you need something held, just tell me. I’ll hold it.” She passes him the scissors and sits down in the chair she’d set by the fire for good light. She had already wetted her hair and she wasn’t eager to do it again.

She hears him huff behind her but then he is closer and pulling a comb through her knotted strands. Her hair has gotten much too long. At least by her standards. She is still a far way off from the length at which most women wear it. But it’s begun to tickle annoyingly at the back of her neck.

She’s out of practice cutting her own hair. Podrick and she had been each other’s barber on the road and she was loathe to go back to doing it herself. She’d never realized how much easier it was with help.

Jaime is gentle with her hair. So gentle, in fact, that Brienne starts to feel her face heat up. She had not meant this to be an intimate act, only a practical one, but there is something about the way he touches her that is reminiscent of the way he touches her in bed.

He wants this to feel good, she thinks absurdly. His touches are light and he makes the comb weave through her hair instead of tearing through it. The tenderness sewn into his attention is obvious and he makes no effort to hide it.

They work through her hair together and she does end up holding parts of it up or down while he cuts off the superfluous locks. By the end, she almost wishes she had more hair just so it could last longer.

“There,” he says as he steps back and hands her a cloth. “Done.”

She stands and turns to face him as she pats away the last of the dampness.

“Well, that wasn’t so—”

She is on him before he even finishes the sentence.

* * *

Another time, they sneak off to the baths in the middle of the night.

The baths are fed by the hot springs that run under Winterfell and Brienne is sure that they were sent by the gods themselves. Old or new. At this moment, as she lounges up to her nose in magnificently warm water, she does not care which.

Jaime sprawls across from her, his head tilted back and his arms spread wide. 

“When did you know you wanted to be a knight?” He says without opening his eyes.

She sits up and even the humid air feels good on her skin.

“When I was seven,” she starts, “my father took me aside. He offered to employ a knight to teach me how to fight.”

“He didn’t catch you sneaking into the armory?”

“He might have, had he waited. I think he knew what I wanted before I did. When I started my lessons, I didn’t realize that I would be…good at it.” She doesn’t say that she had spent so long failing at the tasks assigned to her that she could not conceptualize something being so easy. So natural.

“What’s he like, your father? I don’t think I’ve ever met him.”

“He doesn’t come to the mainland often. He’s too busy at home.” She lets her hands skim the water and pictures her island floating in the bath in front of her. “My father always seems to have so much energy. I don’t know how he does it.”

“An honest man, no doubt.”

She smiles. “Yes.”

It’s warm in the baths but it is a pure warmth. The kind of heat that cleanses. The torches reflect off the water, surrounding them with little spots of light. They must be up early tomorrow but Brienne would not trade this time for sleep. The water soothes her healing injuries and relaxes her muscles in a way she’s not sure they’ve ever been relaxed.

The fact that she is not alone only makes it better somehow. To share this experience, to know that he is feeling what she is feeling, is bliss.

She pulls her legs up to wrap her arms around them.

“I don’t think he wanted me to fight. When I was thirteen, he told me it wasn’t lady-like. But he still let me. I’m his only child and his heir and he lets me go off to join a Kingsguard. I don’t understand him sometimes.”

“I think he was worried for you.” Jaime says, looking at her again. “But he knew what would make you happy. He loved you too much to keep you from it.”

She hums her acknowledgement because she doesn’t know what to say.

“I never knew my mother.” She says instead. “My father has told me stories but…”

“Stories are a pale imitation.” Jaime finishes. “I barely knew my mother either.”

“She died giving birth to Tyrion.”

“Yes.”

They are silent but it is reflective instead of uncomfortable.

“Do you want children?” He says.

“What?” They had been talking about the past. The past was safe, or safer than this at least. This is about the future and the future is dangerous territory. Her ears are hot again.

“Children, do you want them?”

“I don’t know.” She says honestly, leaning back to look at the ceiling. “If I don’t, my family line will die out and who will inherit Tarth? But I’m not even on the island. And I have no experience with babies. I wouldn’t know how to care for one. And besides, who would even…”

He’s already looking at her when she glances at him.

_Who would even marry me?_

She looks away quickly. She cannot stand to hold his gaze under the weight of what they’re saying.

“My septa once doubted whether I could have children at all. The maester said that was foolish talk, though.”

“Why did she doubt it?”

“Thought all the sword-fighting had taken the woman out of me, I suppose.”

“I can assure your septa that there is still plenty of woman left in you.”

She flicks water at him.

“Well, you’ve proven them wrong now, haven’t you?” He muses. She doesn’t know what he means. “You can be both. A lady and a ser.”

She hides her smile in her knees. So that is what he thinks of her.

“It’s late.” She says. “We should be getting back.”

They make it to their room without incident and fall asleep beside each other, stripped raw by the water and the warmth. 

* * *

It can’t last.

The day before the troops move on, they lay down on their bed and all she can think of is how she will have to sleep here when he is gone. She will ask Sansa, she decides as he kisses at her throat, to move her into a different room. One without memories.

She spends the next morning helping the war council members finalize the last of their strategies. She doesn’t mean to avoid him but she also doesn’t mind it. Like breaking a bone, a clean split would heal easiest. They shouldn’t linger in it.

She sees him from a distance in the early afternoon. He is up on the balcony, watching the people prepare to leave. It’s chaos, as moving soldiers always is; packing up belongings, organizing themselves back into units, readying the horses and the wagons.

There are goodbyes to say too. The people gathered here now will never again fight under the same banner.

She finds someplace else to be.

They are all gone before supper.

It is so much quieter in the hall. The wildings had left with the troops, although in the opposite direction. She had not realized how accustomed she had become to the noise of a crowd.

She and Jaime eat in relative silence and return to her room under the same absence of conversation. In the month since the battle, their things have spread all over the small space. His golden hand (he has been wearing it less and less) rests on her table beside the flower, his clothes tucked besides hers. When they enter, they hang up their swords together.

She finds herself annoyed at these reminders of his presence. If he is going to go, just go. 

“I’m tired.” She says. “I’m going to turn in.”

He nods but doesn’t say anything, sitting down at the table instead of the bed and twisting one of his laces around his finger.

She doesn’t fall asleep quickly. He stays in the chair by the fire.

When she wakes alone in the middle of the night, she isn’t surprised.

* * *

She ends up in the Godswood.

She couldn’t stop staring at the white flower, wilted after the weeks it has spent in her room. The fire had gone down too, unattended and left to wither.

 _Somewhere else_ , she thought, _I need to be somewhere else_. She has seen Sansa when she emerges from the Godswood—to remember her family, to think, or to pray, Brienne isn’t sure. But she always looks more peaceful after she has spent time among the weirwoods. Whatever the old gods have to offer, Brienne is willing to listen.

As she walks along the forest, she understands why people pray here. Between the calm silence and the towering trees, it has all the reverence of a sept. Maybe more. Septs are built by man, but the Godswood is untainted. Grown of its own accord.

She is unsure where she’s headed until she’s there. Sansa has spoken of the heart tree but Brienne has never seen it. It is as beautiful and divine as people describe. Its branches sag under their cosmic age. 

There is a man beside it. A familiar man.

She notices his packed bag before hope can even begin to take root. He is still leaving, she just happened to catch him in it.

She can’t stop herself as she moves toward him. She has been foolish, she thinks as he turns to face her. She should say goodbye, for herself if nothing else. She won’t be able to pretend that the last few weeks didn’t happen. She needs them to end this properly.

“Brienne—”

“Ser Jaime.” He will need this too. Whether he dies trying to save the Queen or not, he will want this chapter permanently closed. “It seems that this is goodbye then.”

She doesn’t blame him. He loves Cersei and there is nothing more hateful than failing to protect the one you love. If he saves her, she knows they will disappear. Jaime does not seek the power of the throne, only the safety of the one he cares about.

“Brienne, I—”

“If I may speak freely, Ser.” She says. “So that it does not go unsaid.”

He nods.

She means to tell him goodbye. She means to say that she won’t tell people he has gone but she won’t deny it either. She means to say she has known all along and that she releases him from whatever bond they have forged in the cold.

“You don’t have to die with her.” Oh. There is fight left in her, then. “You’re a good man. You can’t save her.”

“You think me a good man.”

“I know you are.”

“I pushed a child out of a tower window.” He says and there is challenge in him too. Anger, festered for weeks and months and years, pushes to the surface. “That tower, over there, the one we sleep across from. What kind of justice is that?”

“You can’t change the past.”

“And what exactly have I done in the present to atone for it?”

“You said Bran forgave you.”

“He didn’t say—that’s not the point, Brienne. There are a million, hateful things I’ve done. Do you remember what you said to me? _Your crimes are past forgiveness_.”

“Yes, well, I take it back.”

He laughs.

“You are the most stubborn woman I’ve ever met.” She doesn’t want to see the love in his eyes. She can’t take it.

“If you are going to leave, Jaime, then leave. Don’t let us rot here.”

If love was a choice, she doesn’t think anyone would make it. He looks away from her.

“I couldn’t.” He says, quiet, like the fight has left him.

“What?”

“I tried.” He looks older, suddenly. Like the heart tree behind him, weighed down with life. “Everything I’ve done, it seemed fitting…. What kind of a man does what I’ve done and gets to live?”

She doesn’t answer. His laugh is a mix; incredulous, bitter, amazed.

“I didn’t even make it to the Kingsroad. I didn’t want to leave. So I turned back. Brienne, I—I don’t want to die with her.”

They are still standing five feet apart. It is a distance she doesn’t know how to cross, but she feels there may be a bridge coming soon.

“I came to Winterfell to fulfill a promise. And for you.” He moves forward and reaches as if to grab her hand but stops before he gets there. “You must know, Brienne, you must know. It’s you. I don’t like vows. But I will swear, right now, whatever you ask of me. You are the most loyal, honest, inflexible person I know. You see honor in people you’re meant to despise. You hold the world to standards most of humanity has abandoned, only because it’s the right thing to do.”

He looks at her with the desperation of a man on his knees. 

“And I would ask you one thing in return. Let me stay with you. Wherever you go, let me follow. Whether it’s this fucking tundra or Tarth or the bloody Grass Sea.”

She is too shocked to speak.

“Do I ask too much, my lady?”

“Jaime.” When her voice comes out of her, it’s heavy with tears although her eyes are still dry. “You must be sure. I don’t want you to regret this.”

“I won’t.” He says and the quick honesty of it reaches into her heart and plants gardens. “I’m not a good man, but I’m not the man I once was. I want to stay. I want to stay with you.”

She knows he is no stranger to sacrificing for love. He has proven, time and again, the lengths he would go to, the things he would burn, for Cersei. But he isn’t destroying anything here and she isn’t Cersei. It’s a different kind of sacrifice, she thinks, to stay. She wants him to make it.

“I love you.” He says and his eyes are clear.

She sucks in a breath. She really has been foolish. She knows what they have is love but she had not seen its tenacity. She brings her hands to cup his face, like he is something precious.

“I love you.” She says it slowly, firmly, undeniably.

It is only fitting that they are in the Godswood. The kiss they share feels like praying. 

When they part, it hits her what has happened. It startles a laugh out her, which prompts a laugh out of him, and then she is clutching to him desperately.

“It’s not about letting you.” She says as he hangs onto her just as tightly. “I want you to stay.”

“ _You want to and I want to—isn’t that enough?_ ” He repeats back to her as she rubs her thumb across his cheek.

A lump sits in her throat but she gets the words out anyway.

“It’s everything.”

* * *

It takes them a while to get back to their room. There are more kisses, and words, before they leave the Godswood. But it is Winterfell in the middle of the night and eventually the cold drives them back inside to the warmth of their hearth.

They make a good effort of taking their clothes off. Brienne ends up with her trousers undone and her shirt hiked up. Which is better than Jaime, who has one arm out and one arm still in his tunic.

“Wait, wait,” she says, and laughs again. They are ridiculous.

She pulls her shirt over her head and helps Jaime out of his. She sits down on the bed while he takes his trousers off and then lifts her hips when he starts tugging on hers. He kisses her calf, then her knee, but she is too impatient and brings his face up to meet hers.

She leans back, taking him with her.

They slow down and dwell in the kissing. Where it was eager, now it turns calm. It becomes a pleasant, peaceful sort of act. The longer they stay there, the more her want steadies itself.

She’s tired, she realizes unexpectedly. He seems content to linger here as well. Maybe he is just as tired as she is.

They part, taking the other in.

“Tomorrow?” She offers and he smiles. He is exhausted, she can read it in his face.

“Tomorrow.” He agrees.

He runs his hand down her side to wrap it around her and that is almost enough to make her rescind her offer. But her eyes grow heavy as he places pecks across her cheeks.

They have tomorrow. They have tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that. Their future stretches endlessly towards the horizon, like the sea cloaked in a rosy dawn.

They fall asleep in each other’s arms.

* * *

When Brienne wakes, Jaime is stoking the fire. Just in front of him, where the wilting flower had been, is a new group of white blossoms, thriving and lovely.

**Author's Note:**

> The white flowers are snowdrops. They bloom in winter and have many associations in European folklore, from death and bad luck to hope and resilience.
> 
> Also, please note that any disparaging remarks Brienne makes about her looks come from her own insecurities and do not reflect the views of the author. Gwendoline Christie is hot as fuck and I would like that on record.
> 
> Thank you very much for reading! I hope you enjoyed.


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